If you run a few different websites, you might have received a message at some point from a person by the name “Jovana Milutinovich” asking if she could translate a particular page on your website.

Typically, the page in question seems to have been randomly selected, and I posit that WebHostingGeeks is simply trying to get some inbound links for SEO, since I’ve researched other people receiving requests for translation, and noticed that many mailing lists (like ones for PHP, the W3C, and programming language user groups) have identical emails.

The email in question goes something like this:

Dear Sir or Madam, My name is Jovana. I found your page about St. Louis' Eucharistic congress extremely interesting and would like to spread the word for people from Ex Yugoslavia. Here's the URL of your page: [url] Would you mind if I translate your page to Serbo-Croatian language and post it on our site? My purpose is to help people from Ex Yugoslavia better understand some very useful information about computer science. Some quick info about myself: I was born in Yugoslavia, Europe. Former Yugoslavia consisted of now totally independent states like Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia & Hercezovina, Slovenia and Macedonia, which are all united by Serbo-Croatian language. I'm currently studying Computer Science at the University of Belgrade,Serbia. With Kind Regards, Jovana Milutinovich science dot webhostinggeeks dot com

In my earlier naïvety, I said, “Why not?,” and am now receiving about an email a week from this very inquisitive person asking whether I’ve received her translation, and when I will link to it (yes, I did receive it, but no, I don’t think I’ll link to it). I’ve decided to not provide any links to the translated page, simply because it looks to be about the same quality as a Google Translate translation (as far as I can tell), and only seems to be a scammy SEO ploy.

This also should remind people to be very careful about what kind of SEO practices they use, and what companies/marketing groups they use to promote their websites. Don’t just go for some cheap inbound link generation scheme—develop meaningful links to your site.